P. J. O'Rourke Left Quotations

It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.

Conservatives really don't believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don't tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do.

After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He's still here in the United States.

Industrialization came to England but has since left.

Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.

The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there's a reason for that - the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent - No Child Left Behind.